


your body to the flame

by cryptidgay



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Death, End Avatar Agnes Montague, F/F, Fate & Destiny, Sad with a Happy Ending, ships are all pretty background to the plot on this one‚ though y'all know i love gertrudeagnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24581125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: “And me?” Agnes asks, after the usual stories about the wonder of a world wreathed in fire.“What about you?”“Will I…”“We all die to better serve our god, Agnes."(Agnes doubts, and Agnes dies, and Agnes Becomes.)
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Jude Perry
Comments: 13
Kudos: 68





	your body to the flame

**Author's Note:**

> **content warnings:** discussion of death (both on a personal level and a global desolation-ritual scale), canon-compliant suicide via hanging (though she doesn't stay dead in this one), cults, unhealthy relationship dynamics (jude/agnes, not discussed at length).
> 
> **recommended listening:** [body to flame](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=appDLak18JA) by lucy dacus & [firesorrow girl](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/190593310555/shes-finally-here-ive-wanted-to-write-a-song) by ron gerrydelano!
> 
> shoutout to [seraf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf) because without our discussions about end!agnes i definitely wouldn't have had enough fuel to write this fic. (everyone go read his gerry + mike fic!)

Messiahs are not read bedtime stories. 

No; at Agnes Montague’s bedside, even as a child, had sat a rotating cast of Lightless Flame devotees, some of which said nothing for fear of angering the precocious little firestarter, some of which told her of her destiny.

A glorious scorched earth, they would say. Her mother had wanted it badly enough to give her life to the cause, turned to ash and leaving little Agnes silent on the smoldering pyre. Five acres gone to bring about their savior. A small price to pay.

By the time she was ferried away to the house on Hill Top Road, Agnes knew exactly what a completed ritual would look like. Flame replacing the cool blue of the sky, no more breeze in the air. Flowers, trees, houses, people: all wilted. Not much can survive a desolated planet, and isn’t that the point? Worship to the point of ruin. Everything dead, gone, burnt to a crisp.

“And me?” Agnes asks, after the usual stories about the wonder of a world wreathed in fire.

The storyteller of the night — not Diego or Arthur, but one of the more temporary members of the Lightless Flame, destined to be burned up by one thing or another and not strong enough to survive the immolation — startles. Agnes hardly speaks. Her rare syllables are reserved for answers to others’ questions when she deems them important enough to respond, but she’s never before responded to the tales of her destiny.

“What about you?”

“Will I…” She does not dare speak her doubt, eight years old and fully aware it would be a blasphemy. The candles around her speak for her. Their warmth (always far too hot) and their light (never bright enough to see by) flicker, and she sees her watcher notice, take in the meaning.

“We all die to better serve our god, Agnes. It’s incredible enough to have a destiny in the first place; it doesn’t do to  _ question it _ . It’ll bring about the most glorious world — the earth opened up, the molten core flowing freely...”

Agnes stops listening, turning the idea of her own death over in her mind instead. She could recite the Flame’s exaltations of a successful ritual by memory, in her sleep. It’s uninteresting.

She doesn’t like the thought of dying, even to better serve the flame. This, too, she does not dare to say.

—————

Raymond Fielding is kind right up until the moment the Web decides it does not suit it to be kind to the infiltrator in their midst. Spiderwebs, after all, are very flammable.

“You should stop,” she says. Just-barely-teenaged, now, but so much more confident in her voice on the rare occasion that she chooses to use it. Her words carry weight; not the amount a messiah  _ should _ , by all rights, hold, but an improvement from the wavering half-syllables that had once been all she could lay claim to. 

She does not speak to the others often. More often, she stays in her room. Listens to the few sparse records she’s gathered. Reads, and rereads, and reads again: her supply of entertainment is sparse, but it doesn’t do to sit without anything to occupy her mind. When her thoughts wander, they always go back to flame.

Much as Hill Top has not always been as safe a haven as she was led to believe it would be, she doesn’t want to see it burn. Not yet, at least.

“Agnes,” he says, like he’s scolding her. Like she’s still a  _ child _ , and has no power of her own. She cannot be ensnared by web; they’re both well aware of this fact. “What do you care? If your cult’s wishes come to pass, they’ll die regardless. Better the Mother than the pain yours would bring.”

It’s the first time she’s heard the Lightless Flame called a cult, but it will be far from the last. She has only a passing familiarity with the concept — and it should be more  _ malicious _ than the Flame has been, shouldn’t it? More like Hill Top House.

She isn’t quite sure the Flame’s people  _ love _ her, but anyone that evil wouldn’t raise a child, would they? Wouldn’t forgive her when she burns them, even when some of those hurt are too candlewax-melted to come back whole again?

She puts that away. Marks it to deal with later.

The rest of his words do nothing to reassure her, and bring only more questions she will not dare to voice aloud, questions of pain and of the fate of those  _ not _ already bound to the Lightless One when her destiny comes to pass. Her family, such as they were, had focused on the  _ aftermath _ : glorious, glowing, desolate, devoid of life.

But there’s the in-between to consider. 

Her own probable death, yes, but… The other children here, those who have not yet been snared by the Spider. The lovely old woman at the bookstore in town who asks if her parents are well and does not push if it is the sort of day where words burn their way up her throat until all that emerges is coughed-out smoke. 

Last month she’d gone to a playground just to see what she was missing in her utterly abnormal childhood, sat on the swings until her hands on their metal chain had smoldered to the point of danger, and a boy with dark hair had sat next to her. Hadn’t spoken a word, just  _ sat there _ , quiet, kind. She’d smiled at him as she left. He, too, would go up in flame. 

More painful than Web.

She shakes her head. Isn’t sure if it’s a rejection of his claim —  _ of course I wouldn’t bring them pain, no matter what the others want, can’t you see that? Can’t you see me? _ — or simply a show of her utter inability to speak on the matter. The wondering has been enough to leave her words charred. 

“You should stop,” she repeats. “I won’t ask again.”

The spidersilk roads that all lead to Hill Top House dry up soon after. No more children. No more Raymond.

And eventually Agnes is alone. Alone in the empty house, alone with her thoughts, alone to sacrifice small gifts to the Mother to keep her sated and keep vengeance away — for she has no doubt the spider wants revenge for her interruption of its sacrifices. So long as she keeps it fed with neighborhood pets gone mysteriously missing, the cobwebs stay away from her, do not trip her as she goes down the heavy-wood staircases or choke her as she sleeps.

The bookseller in town dies. Her daughter takes over the business and regards Agnes with suspicion every time the bell above the entryway signals her arrival, as if she can smell the smoke on her and is waiting, waiting, waiting for Agnes to burn all of her pages to the ground.

“Was it painful?” She asks in her small voice, placing a tall selection of books on the counter. “Your mother. Her death. Did it hurt?”

Agnes wants to understand, so badly it aches. She has seen people die — those of the Flame, those who’d come too close or spoken too loud or demanded answers when she hadn’t the words to give them, and suddenly all was smoke and singed flesh and screaming. The Lightless Flame is of two minds on the nature of pain, somehow coexisting despite their contradiction: it is delicious when inflicted on others, but it is punishable with days locked in a candleless room when their messiah accidentally slips and incinerates those of their ranks.

She wants to  _ understand _ . Human pain — the kind not born of waxen wishes and candlewicks. If she is destined to be the source of it, she would like, at the very least, to know the feeling.

Agnes never achieves any understanding. The bookseller’s daughter, who is now the bookseller herself, stares wide-eyed at her for a long, desperate moment.

Then she breaks her spell. Orders Agnes out without her stack of novels. Tells her she is not welcome back again.

She doesn’t leave the house on Hill Top Road for a long time. She stands at its heart until it is ash around her.

She thinks, then, that she might understand loss.

—————

Jude means well, Agnes thinks.

Or rather: Jude  _ doesn’t _ , because that is the whole point of her, the point of those who have given themselves flesh and soul over to their God; they cause pain, they delight in devastation, laugh in the face of unfathomable loss. But with Agnes, and Agnes alone, she is something approaching gentle. Agnes has no doubt in her mind that this is the softest Jude Perry has ever been.

She does not flinch back when her fingertips on Agnes’ skin melt her own wax effigy; she reforms, rebuilds, always slightly changed in the aftermath. She lays next to Agnes and does not question Agnes’ silence, does not fill it with aimless sentences that mean nothing.

Jude has been circling round Agnes’ orbit since the day she joined the Cult, before Agnes had even begun thinking of the group as the venomous snake it is. Before she’d doused herself in gasoline, before she’d ever killed, she had lain eyes on Agnes and flocked to her. Why, then, does Agnes not know which of them is the moth and which is the flame? Which of them will burn the other? 

It should be clear-cut, the role of a messiah: she is told that she is the embodiment of their God, desolation incarnate, and she should revel in the role, accept willing followers of their cause as is befitting one of her stature. The fire glows goldenhot through her veins. On some days it is painful. She is told that it shouldn’t be; that it is nothing less than holy.

But she was never the leader of the Lightless Flame. Agnes is a figurehead, nothing more. She is expected to stand and say the things Arthur and Diego expect her to, and to drift into the background when she is finished. She’s a pretty face. All that burning rage she holds beneath her skin is expected to stay hidden, but neither is she to be soft, kind, caring.

She’s meant to be  _ empty. _ A vessel for them to put their ideals of a Goddess in, and nothing more.

Though Jude is whatever passes for  _ lovely _ in their circles whenever alone with Agnes, she will always worship more thoroughly than she loves. Agnes has heard the other followers of the Flame whispering about the two of them; the way Jude looks at her,  _ unbefitting of a follower, inappropriate for their God to return any affection _ . She’s always more Desolation in their eyes than she is a person in her own right.

It’s a difficult question, whether or not she  _ can _ lay claim to personhood. Pyreborn and ever-smoldering.  _ Did you know _ , asked a girl who’d thought about joining their ranks but had been claimed by icy cowardice at the last minute,  _ that your name means holy? It’s fitting, is all. It’s a beautiful name. _

Agnes’ temper rarely gets the best of her nowadays, too wrapped up beneath layers of flame-resistant desperation to be something  _ more _ , but she’d been of half a mind to burn the girl before another word slipped past her lips.

It hadn’t been for the girl, that yearning for ash, but for herself — her destiny — the denial from  _ birth _ that she could ever have been anything other than divine. The desolation steals potential, and there is something beneath her skin that hungers for that theft, brightens and burns beautifully when ruin is near.

Should it not be sated by her own life, existing only for the sake of being hallowed and hollow?

She is not human. She has known that for some time now; twenty-two and just-stopped-aging, static as the world continues around her. (A flame cannot be kept so still, but she does not so much as fidget, sitting in a wooden chair for hours until it’s charred ash on the ground.)

There are so many questions flitting around in her mind, and none of them have simple answers. The part of her that is nothing but Desolation angers at that: for suffering is simple, and anything more complicated can be solved by taking and taking from the object of confusion until there is nothing left to mourn.

She is sitting in front of a mirror. Hairbrush paused halfway through a strand of long, auburn hair. Furrow in her brow, a cramp sparking in her hand: she must have been sitting this way for a long time, frozen.

“Agnes?” Jude says her name like it’s consecrated ground. Smile on her face as she walks behind Agnes within the mirror’s view. “All alright?”

It’s an easy question. The kind she would delight in answering with matching candor:  _ No, _ she might say, and smile, and leave it at that with the weight of a singular truth lifted from her ribcage.

Agnes has never been to church, but she thinks Jude looks at her the way one would look at a statue of a saint. Untouchable, beyond reproach, and unable to be anything but pure.

What would she do if Agnes told her that she  _ doubts? _

She’s seen Jude in the heat of a kill, that joy on her face as humanity burns around her. Jude is told the same stories Agnes grew up with, the scorched earth and the everlasting burning that will bring it upon them, and she revels in the thought in a way Agnes never had, even when childlike naivety had blinded her more thoroughly than any firelight ever could.

She’s seen members of the Cult kill those who have begun to question their purpose, turning their flame against them, leaving them a waxpuddle to scrape off the ground once the screaming ceases.

Agnes has never put voice to her questioning, her worry, her everpresent infectious doubt that  _ aches _ within her. She knows her role here well, and knows that punishment comes to those who disbelieve.

“Fine,” she says, and she smiles as she pulls the brush through her hair. Once, twice, a hundred times. A small ritual, as if to prepare for the larger one on the horizon.

—————

Gertrude Robinson may be the only soul in the world who knows the truth of Agnes Montague.

Perhaps it is naive to thank the Mother of Puppets for this, but Agnes sees it as an even exchange; she had kept the Spider fed at Hill Top House, and been gifted an escape in return. Bound to Gertrude, she cannot fulfill her destiny. With fate’s strings tying them in a thousand different places, the Flame cannot kill the Archivist without their messiah dying in just as much agony.

She will live. They both will. And someday, when Gertrude Robinson dies her mortal death, Agnes will reevaluate; perhaps by then she will have an escape route in mind.

She has thought, many times, about packing the saved-up candles she keeps stacked in her flat, leaving in the dead of night. A note to say goodbye to Jude, perhaps; she is the only person who may care even a shred about Agnes-the-person, though Agnes is well aware most of her loyalty lies with Agnes-the-God.

The plan always ends there. The problem, at its core, is not with the Cult. It is with  _ her _ : a faulty messiah, put together wrong. Something unholy runs through her and she is exhausted from fighting it.

Running would not change who she is.

It is good, once she grows past the sparks of anger and the desperation for the bond to snap between them like so much loose thread, to have someone who knows what she feels without her having to voice it. Agnes has never been good with words, after all. She was never given the vocabulary to explain her doubt; a thousand words for fire but none for unrest.

Whether via the eye or via the ties between them, Gertrude sits across from Agnes, both forty-odd years old but only one showing it in any meaningful way. Agnes holds a mug of coffee. Gertrude’d offered, when she’d arrived to her flat and found Agnes waiting on her sofa, and both of them had known very well that Agnes would not drink it but found the warmth in her hands a comforting weight, so she had said  _ yes, black coffee, room for milk _ , and had not added any milk, and Gertrude had understood. It was almost a joke. They almost laughed.

“You’re thinking about it again,” Gertrude says. Agnes has not said a word, but it makes no different; her thoughts have been boiling over with disbelief for weeks.

The Cult has compensated their impatience for a ritual with more and more carnage; forest fires and families and factoryworkers burnt to candlewax. She cannot claim not to be complicit. She breathes in that smoke as eagerly as any Avatar, but her lungs ache something awful as they fill and the smell of blood is too much to bear. She chokes on it more often than not, these days.

They will not state their concerns in so many words, all of them as choked for emotion beyond the comfortable bounds of joyful anger and rage-filled elation as their martyr is, but she can feel their impatience with  _ her _ .

What use is Agnes to the Lightless Flame with all her fire tied behind her back? They could replace her so easily. Kill her and be done with the pointlessness of their figurehead, sort out a new plan.

Agnes nods. Quiet, always quiet. “There’s no point to me anymore.” It isn’t a question, isn’t even a  _ doubt _ : it’s as sure as the scorchmarks she will leave on Gertrude’s hand-me-down sofa.

“Of course there is.” Gertrude is just as steady in her words; dismissing, if anything, as if Agnes’ purpose could be handwaved away in favor of something better. “Theirs is not the only fate for you, Agnes. There’s more to the world than your cult.”

“There  _ isn’t _ .” She’d seen the outside, a half-childhood spent beyond Desolation’s reach, and it had done nothing to assure her that she could be more than the destiny she’s been given. It is in her  _ bones _ , her name, her mother’s final acts and her father’s death long before and whatever family she had ever found within the Cult’s ranks.

“You could leave them. Find your own way.”

Agnes does not respond. There are a thousand ways she could:  _ there’s nothing else for me, I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t know what to do on my own, I’m not enough without them to guide me _ . None of them feel like the truth, though, and she thinks she’s done enough lying.

Gertrude knows all of it, and feels how hollow each swallowed excuse rings. She doesn’t have to say it aloud. They sit in silence until even Agnes’ hands are not enough to keep the coffee warmed, and then she leaves, wordless, more lost than when she’d begun.

—————

“I think you should have these.” Gertrude says, a decade later. Gertrude’s living room is entirely unchanged, and they take the same positions every time she visits: Agnes curled on the edge of the sofa, leaving faint burns in her wake. It’s the sixth sofa she’s seen, and she feels an odd pang of guilt for that, but being Archivist must give Gertrude money enough to replace the things Agnes ruins.

A stack of cleancut manila folders is placed on the coffee table beside a cup of black coffee, room for milk.

“What are they?” There’s a genuine curiosity there. Agnes has never passed within the walls of the Eye’s temple, but she has sat beside Gertrude as she speaks statements into the air, listened voraciously as if it were knowledge rather than flame that fed her. 

(Gertrude had told her, once, that she would have made a spectacular Avatar of Beholding in another life; that perhaps they’d been destined to swap places, if not for Gertrude’s stubborn love of the world. Agnes struggles to imagine herself as anything other than what she has always been, even unhappy in that state.)

“Statements,” Gertrude says, sips at her own cup of black coffee. All of her mugs are plain, colorless. Agnes has thought about buying her more interesting ones, but every time she starts to walk into a shop it seems a foolish endeavor, and she turns back.

Agnes nods, and Gertrude carries on. “Your position is unique. No one else, as far as I’ve been able to find, has been born into service of an entity quite in the way you were. As you can imagine, it has been difficult at best to do any research into how to  _ remedy _ your situation, as such.”

Agnes stares, eyes widening, embers sparking somewhere just behind her irises. She’d had no idea Gertrude was doing any research on her behalf. It’s an act with such weight to unpack that it lands heavy upon her: of course Gertrude knows of her wavered faith, but to decide it was a task to be solved, to care enough to try to do so…

It leaves Agnes half-breathless as she waits for Gertrude to continue.

“There are very few people who have managed to leave any entity behind once claimed. But I have found reports of a few. They did not leave to become fully  _ human _ , I’m still unsure that’s possible — but it may be worth consideration. An option, at the very least.”

Agnes nods. She is all at once grateful for the weight of the coffee mug between her palms: it would be enough to burn were she human, but as it is, it is enough to keep her on earth, hold her in the present rather than floating somewhere above the smokestacks. Her voice comes out shaking when she finally dares to speak. “Can I take them?”

“Probably best you don’t bring them to your flat, so the others don’t find them.” Ever practical, her Gertrude.

“Right. Of course.” Agnes’ voice is soft. She looks at that stack of wayward papers like it is salvation, and it just may be.

“You can read through them here, though. I’d best be going into the Archives; you’re free to stay as long as you like.”

Agnes should thank Gertrude, wish her a good day at work, do anything at all, but she is frozen solid. She does not realize Gertrude is gone until the click of the door sounds behind her, and it’s with an unforeseen hunger that she swaps her untouched coffee for the papers, holds them into the light like some holy text.

—————

As it turns out, only one story is of much relevance. A man chased by fractaling lightning, tormented with restless spirals, who had found a book and thrown himself from a cathedral.

It seems quite a desperate measure to take.

Agnes is only glancingly familiar with those belonging to other Fears; she does not know their Gods’ names nor their purposes, but the Cult has had some dealings with the Fairchilds. Those of the Falling Titan. She has never met them, but has heard enough tales to recognize  _ Ex Altiora _ as theirs and the jump as what it is: a leap of faith.

“I am yours,” Michael Crew had said. The man giving the statement writes that he had jumped to his death, but Gertrude has penned a note in neat capital letters on the margins: a man with dark hair and a branching lightning scar has been seen in various locales, tending towards rooftops. Always looking at home against the backdrop of bright-blue sky.

She does not know if this is applicable to her. Agnes has never felt at home among any sky not filled with smoke and ash, and she is not merely a  _ victim _ of the Flame, but an embodiment, consumed in her entirety by that which created her.

But the Desolation has stolen so much from her. Could she not claim it feeds on her just as much as it feeds her? Is it more parasitic in one direction than the other?

(Who is the moth? Who is the flame? And why does she get the sense she will burn painfully before sorting out the answer to the question?)

Once again, she is filled with questions, the answers to which ache in their complexity. There’s nothing to be done but sort through them, and that on its own is a task so daunting as to be nearly impossible.

It is, however, a place to begin. Yesterday, she had less than nothing; today, she has a starting point.

She leaves a  _ thank you _ note on Gertrude’s table and takes the statement with her. She’ll return it when she has it memorized in its entirety.

—————

For years, Agnes had existed with the faint hope that her belief would snap back into place someday. If only she waited, the infection of blasphemy that has pervaded her soul would find her an unworthy host and flee, and she could have  _ peace _ in a burnt world.

It takes her half a century to let go of that desperate plea.

The Cult of the Lightless Flame speaks of destiny as if it is unchangeable, and they bear no mind to whether or not their martyr wishes for the destruction they preach. It is possible, she thinks, that they are correct. She has never met anyone else with a destiny. There are very few sources to seek information from.

It does not matter.

She goes on a date with Jack Barnabas because she is curious, because she yearns to know what a shred of humanity is like. He blushes when he sees her and she cannot quite understand why. He reaches out to take her gloved hand, and she screws her face up with the effort of keeping the heat from burning him through her woolen mittens, and he interprets this as rejection and places his hands firmly into his own coat pockets.

It is not his hand in hers that she misses in particular, but a point of connection is so rare in her life, she cannot help but wish she could ask him to hold her again.

As it is, she has never been good at such small questions. Never seen much of a point to put her voice to anything that does not mean something; her words come so scarcely, but there is always weight to them. They, at least, have purpose. She asks instead whether or not Jack Barnabas has a destiny.

She knows the answer. Normal people do not have fates. They may believe in their Gods and worship at their temples, they may even be ensnared in the work of Avatars they cannot comprehend, but they do not have that awful weight upon their shoulders.

“No,” he says.

“That must be nice,” she says. It sounds like an aimless platitude, but she means it with the entirety of her.

It is in this moment that she concludes, wholeheartedly, without a fraction of doubt in her soul, that she  _ does not want _ what is destined for her. The scorched earth, the Desolation, the burntflesh candles, the fire that glows through her very bones and steals the warmth from her heart.

She thinks of the statement gifted to her by Gertrude years prior, and she thinks of options. Escape routes. She thinks of what the Cult would do to her if she were to confess her wavering, and the possibility that they will know the moment they lay eyes on her; she has been avoiding them as much as she can, feigning sleep when they come by her flat, but she knows that they will see it in her eyes. Burn her, or send her north without a jacket and wait for the flame to freeze its way out of her and leave her shivering until she no longer has the life remaining for even that.

They will kill her, she knows.

Agnes Montague does not know the names of all the powers, but she is aware of them the way a hand is aware of the body it is attached to, the way one piece of wood in a fireplace feels the presence of everything that has ever been kindling.

She wants to be gentle. She wants the very absence of burning flesh and smokedark skies. She wants freedom.

She has made a choice.

—————

Agnes is dead. Agnes is not dead.

The distinction, really, matters less than she may have thought.

In Agnes’ candlelit flat with its bare wooden floors and scorched footsteps littering the ground, they’d hung her up with a corpse’s hand around her waist and wayward followers singing her praises. Who were they to deny the wishes of their messiah? Agnes, after all, has always been so steady-spoken in their presence, so sure of the few scant requests she has ever made from them:  _ I will be reborn, and ready to lead us to the scorched earth, then, but the time is not now. It is not now. It will be soon. _

They’d believed her, though her hands had shaken in her pockets as she lied. She has been telling them little but falsehoods for a long time, but this one scratches at her soul, threatens to tear her apart if she finds any fault in it.

To the end, the Cult had not known of her doubts. They may have suspected poor Jack Barnabas as a catalyst for her decision, but she has asked Gertrude to lend him as much protection as she is able. 

(“A last wish,” Agnes had said, a wry smile at the corners of her red lips.

“You’ve made a choice, then,” Gertrude had replied. Devoid of any hint as to how she may feel about the decision.

“You know I have.” Agnes had laid a kiss on Gertrude’s cheek, and it had not burned her. Only a smear of lipstick in her wake. A parting gift from their bond.)

Agnes Montague dies, not in fire but in peace, in hope, in desperation for something different.

When she comes back, every candle littering the ground is burnt to the quick and the Lightless Flame is gone, both Cult and God vanished from her presence. It is perhaps the first time she has made a choice to herself, veered off the path she has been given for so many years, and she is  _ free _ in a way that makes her stopped heart soar.

The End does not need terror to fuel it the same way the Desolation and its ilk do. Terminus simply  _ is _ : eternal, everpresent, the victor of every battle that has ever existed and every conflict yet to come. There is no smoke to breathe in, no screams to feast upon. It is feared enough by its mere existence.

Every moment to come will feel exactly as the moment she died: this aching liberty taking wings in her chest. A fire at long last extinguished.

There are no guardian angels or gentle grim reapers waiting to guide souls to some unfathomable afterlife, but she is there in her warm flame —  _ warm _ , now; not destructive or scalding or too bright to look into without blinding, but warm, like a hearth, a fireplace, a bonfire, a favorite memory curled up in blankets and tea.

She will be a warm light in the last moments of so many.

For now, Agnes Montague, Avatar of the End, stands in the center of her darkened flat, and she laughs. She has never before felt such untempered joy.

**Author's Note:**

> the fire ghost in ep100 was agnes and no one can tell me otherwise.
> 
> leave a comment if you'd like! let me know what you thought! find me on tumblr at [dykivist!](http://dykivist.tumblr.com)


End file.
